Scenario planning is an essential element of risk analysis and management, and my colleagues and I at Business Monitor International constantly have to envisage potential chains of events in economies, financial markets, and the political arena. With this in mind, I thought I’d take the opportunity to comment on a book I read recently: 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War In The 21^st Century, by Andrew Krepinevich, a former US army officer.

The book is written from the point of view of a future historian assessing key foreign policy crises for the US president, and the author aims for such a high degree of realism that any footnotes in the text referring to events after the completion of his manuscript in late 2008 are fictional, for example, ‘President Weighs Options, New York Times, May 1, 2011, p. A1.’

Krepinevich’s ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ are as follows:

• The collapse of Pakistan and the break-up of its army into loyalist and radical Islamist factions, both armed with nuclear weapons.

• A series of terror attacks against cities in the US involving stolen Russian nuclear warheads.

• A new and deadly flu pandemic sweeping north into the US from Mexico, causing massive refugee flows.

• A new war against Israel by Hezbollah, with the backing of Iran (who else?!).

• Rising civil unrest in China, prompting the country to impose a blockade of Taiwan and threatening war against the US if it intervenes.

• A terrorist war on the global economy, by means of attacking infrastructure and logistics chains, and through sophisticated cyber-attacks.

• A civil war in Iraq following a dramatic reduction of US troops.

Each scenario is stand-alone, and thus does not take place in the same ‘universe’. In each case, Krepinevich chronicles the sequences of events leading up to the crisis and its immediate aftermath, but most chapters end with the US President on the cusp of a critical decision as to whether to take America to war – and the domestic and international factors that he (or she) has to weigh.

Regarding the scenarios themselves, most are within the realm of possibility – although I found Scenario 2 (multiple nuclear bomb detonations in the US) somewhat fantastical and improbable (see this Wall Street Journal article on the unlikelihood of nuclear terrorism). On the other hand, Scenario 3 seems particularly prescient in view of the recent outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, although in Krepinevich’s narrative, he envisages a far bigger crisis, involving tens of millions of people – which of course is still possible. Arguably, Scenario 7 has the most interesting conclusion, with China announcing that it is deploying tens of thousands of troops to the Persian Gulf, thus displacing the US as the preeminent foreign power in the region.

While Krepinevich’s ‘7 Deadly Scenarios’ are for the most part realistic enough, herein lies the problem: most are rather obvious, and have been written about previously. That does not mean they will not happen, but I will play devil’s advocate and say that because they are obvious, they are less likely to happen, if you accept the logic that improbable events are the most likely. Thus, a bolder book in terms of predictions might have involved the implosion of Russia rather than Pakistan, China attacking Vietnam instead of blockading Taiwan, or China and India clashing in a post-collapse Myanmar, or even the US coming to blows with India. Of course, Krepinevich cannot write about every possible permutation, but these are some less obvious alternatives.

Overall, 7 Deadly Scenarios is a readable and well-thought out forecast of international crises that may be faced by the US over the coming years. It is thus highly recommended for scenario planners.